100+ Quotes by John Green
John Green, a contemporary American author, has earned widespread acclaim for his young adult novels that tackle complex themes with sensitivity and wit. His writing is characterized by well-drawn characters, sharp dialogue, and exploration of profound emotional landscapes. Notably, "The Fault in Our Stars" is a poignant exploration of young love and terminal illness, demonstrating Green's ability to balance heartache with humor. Beyond his novels, John Green is recognized for his online presence and engagement with his fanbase. He and his brother Hank co-created the YouTube channel "Vlogbrothers," which offers educational and entertaining content. Green's ability to connect with his audience through literature and digital platforms has solidified his position as a leading figure in contemporary YA fiction.
John Green Quotes
Some people have lives; some people have music. (Meaning)
That's the thing about pain, it demands to be felt. (Meaning)
Great books help you understand, and they help you feel understood. (Meaning)
Without Pain, How Could We Know Joy? (Meaning)
We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreperably broken. (Meaning)
The world may be broken, but hope is not crazy. (Meaning)
You can love someone so much...But you can never love people as much as you can miss them. (Meaning)
The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive. (Meaning)
You are so busy being YOU that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are. (Meaning)
Pain is like fabric: The stronger it is, the more it’s worth. (Meaning)
My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations. (Meaning)
If you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all. (Meaning)
We are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. (Meaning)
What matters to you defines your mattering. (Meaning)
Good friends are hard to find and impossible to forget. (Meaning)
Love is keeping the promise anyway. (Meaning)
How strange and how lovely it is to be anything at all. (Meaning)
What you must understand about me is that I’m a deeply unhappy person. (Meaning)
Funerals...are for the living. (Meaning)
That smile could end wars and cure cancer. (Meaning)
March 4th, the only day that is also a sentence (Meaning)
Without pain, we couldn't know joy. (Meaning)
it is the nature of stars to cross (Meaning)
When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books. (Meaning)
there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars (Meaning)
What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable? (Meaning)
The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. (Meaning)
I may die young, but at least I'll die smart. (Meaning)
No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can't go all the way around. (Meaning)
...And in freedom, most people find sin. (Meaning)
Maybe 'okay' will be our 'always (Meaning)
My love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity, ~ Hazel Lancaster. (Meaning)
We are greater than the sum of our parts. (Meaning)
Our fearlessness shall be our secret weapon. (Meaning)
Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. (Meaning)
The marks humans leave are too often scars. (Meaning)
As long as we don't die, this is gonna be one hell of a story. (Meaning)
You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful. (Meaning)
As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once. (Meaning)
She loved mysteries so much that she became one. (Meaning)
Maybe all the strings inside him broke. (Meaning)
Books belong to their readers. (Meaning)
At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze. (Meaning)
The town was paper, but the memories were not. (Meaning)
Truth resists simplicity. (Meaning)
Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (Meaning)
I'd rather wonder than get answers I couldn't live with. (Meaning)
So dawn goes down today... Nothing gold can stay. -- Robert Frost (Meaning)
Sometimes people don't understand the promises they're making when they make them. (Meaning)
The world is not a wish-granting factory. (Meaning)
I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend. (Meaning)
Barnacles on the container ship of consciousness. (Meaning)
At least I carpe'd that one diem. (Meaning)
Everything that comes together falls apart. (Meaning)
All salvation is temporary (Meaning)
I love you present tense. (Meaning)
the existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate (Meaning)
I go to seek a Great Perhaps. (Meaning)
I do, Augustus. I do. (Meaning)
We had to forgive to survive the labyrinth (Meaning)
A desert blessing, an ocean curse. (Meaning)
It is so hard to leave-until you leave. (Meaning)
I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend. (Meaning)
Barnacles on the container ship of consciousness. (Meaning)
The sun was a toddler insistently refusing to go to bed: It was past eight thirty and still light. (Meaning)
Suffering is universal. (Meaning)
A desert blessing, an ocean curse. (Meaning)
the existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate (Meaning)
Nothing really ever happens like you imagine it will. (Meaning)
Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.
Amsterdam is like the rings of a tree: It gets older as you get closer to the center.
My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.
The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.
You can love someone so much...But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.
Great books help you understand, and they help you feel understood.
Oh, I wouldn't mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.
I don’t know a perfect person. I only know flawed people who are still worth loving.
If people could see me the way I see myself - if they could live in my memories - would anyone love me?
What you must understand about me is that I’m a deeply unhappy person.
Without pain, how could we know joy?' This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.
The human tongue is like wasabi: it's very powerful, and should be used sparingly.
Maybe there is something you're afraid to say, or someone you're afraid to love, or somewhere you're afraid to go. It's gonna hurt. It's gonna hurt because it matters.
If you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all.
One day, you’re 17 and you’re planning for someday. And then quietly, without you ever really noticing, someday is today. And then someday is yesterday. And this is your life.
Our lives are composed of a finite set of moments that we choose how to spend.
Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.
The world may be broken, but hope is not crazy.
We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreperably broken.
They love their hair because they're not smart enough to love something more interesting.
It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.
You are so busy being YOU that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.
Not that smart. Not that hot. Not that nice. Not that funny. That's me: I'm not that.
I feel like, like, how you matter is defined by the things that matter to you. You matter as much as the things that matter to you.
Just a word of advice. Whenever you're furious with your parents or you think they're terrible, just remember, you vomited on them and they kept you.
What's the point in being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable? How very odd, to believe God gave you life, and yet not think that life asks more of you than watching TV.
We all use the future to escape the present.
That's the thing about pain, it demands to be felt.
It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn’t the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.
Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting.
I don't think your missing pieces ever fit inside you again once they go missing.
Without Pain, How Could We Know Joy?
It hurts because it mattered.
Every year, many, many stupid people graduate from college. And if they can do it, so can you.
Home is Where the Heart Is, Good Friends Are Hard to Find and Impossible to Forget. True Love is Born from Hard Times.
You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world...but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.
You are helpful, and you are loved, and you are forgiven, and you are not alone.
What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.
All salvation is temporary," Augustus shot back. "I bought them a minute. Maybe that's the minute that buys them an hour, which is the hour that buys them a year. No one's gonna buy them forever, Hazel Grace, but my life bought them a minute. And that's not nothing.
Maybe 'okay' will be our 'always
There's some people in this world who you can just love and love and love no matter what.
Don’t make stuff because you want to make money - it will never make you enough money. And don’t make stuff because you want to get famous - because you will never feel famous enough. Make gifts for people - and work hard on making those gifts in the hope that those people will notice and like the gifts.
Some people have lives; some people have music.
You don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.
The past feels distant, even when it's near. The future feels assured, even when it isn't.
I'm not sure if I'm depressed. I mean, I'm not exactly sad. But I'm not exactly happy either. I can laugh and joke and smile during the day, But sometimes when I'm alone at night I forget how to feel.
There is no Them. There are only facets of Us.
I just want to do something that matters. Or be something that matters. I just want to matter.
I figured something out. The future is unpredictable.
I'm not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.
Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start.
Life works best when we think of people as people.
...whatever you're worried about, you're bigger than the worries.
How do you just stop being terrified of getting left behind and ending up by yourself forever and not meaning anything to the world?
Poetry is just so emo." he said. "Oh, the pain. The pain. It always rains. In my soul.
I think inspiration is always around; it's just a question of whether or not you're noticing it.
Good friends are hard to find and impossible to forget.
It is very sad to me that some people are so intent on leaving their mark on the world that they don’t care if that mark is a scar.
We all want to do something to mitigate the pain of loss or to turn grief into something positive, to find a silver lining in the clouds. But I believe there is real value in just standing there, being still, being sad.
We are all going, I thought, and it applies to turtles and turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.
We are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be.
I was born into Bolívar's labyrinth, and so I must believe in the hope of Rabelais' Great Perhaps.
We live in this irreparably broken world, and I don't wish to deny reality, but the amazing thing to me is not that we refuse to relinquish hope as a species. The amazing thing is that we're right to hold on to hope. The world may be broken, but hope is not crazy. ... Obviously not all stories end happily. We don't always have good fortune, but hope gives us, as a species and as individuals, what we otherwise wouldn't have: A chance.
What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?
How strange and how lovely it is to be anything at all.
...it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.
Adult librarians are like lazy bakers: their patrons want a jelly doughnut, so they give them a jelly doughnut. Children’s librarians are ambitious bakers: 'You like the jelly doughnut? I’ll get you a jelly doughnut. But you should try my cruller, too. My cruller is gonna blow your mind, kid.
Grief doesn't change you. It reveals you.
Love is keeping the promise anyway.
I dislike the phrase ‘Internet friends,’ because it implies that people you know online aren’t really your friends, that somehow the friendship is less real or meaningful to you because it happens through Skype or text messages. The measure of a friendship is not its physicality but its significance.
That smile could end wars and cure cancer.
We are greater than the sum of our parts.
The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of a sentence.
"Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will," she says. The sky is like a monochromatic contemporary painting, drawing me in with its illusion of depth, pulling me up. "Yeah, that's true," I say. But then after I think about it for a second, I add, "But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all."
To be human is to catch the falling person.
It's just that I learned a while ago that the best way to get people to like you is not to like them too much.
What matters to you defines your mattering.
You either have a great social life and shitty taste in music, or a fantastic taste in music with barely any social life.
Everything that comes together falls apart. Everything. The chair I’m sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I’m gonna fall apart, probably before this chair. And you’re gonna fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you you—they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart. The Buddha knew one thing science didn’t prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart.
It seemed like forever ago, like we've had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.
My inner goddess is doing the merengue with some salsa moves.
I don't know how I look, but I know how I feel: Young. Goofy. Infinite.
When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books.
You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories, and we made the funny choice.
You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.
Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.
The marks humans leave are too often scars.
My love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity, ~ Hazel Lancaster.
When we read the right book generously, it can change the way think about the world around us.
I try to live life so that I can live with myself.
Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.
We all romanticize the people we adore.
Being in a relationship, that's something you choose. Being friends, that's something you just are.
Pain is like fabric: The stronger it is, the more it’s worth.
We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either.
Do you ever wonder whether people would like you more or less if they could see inside you? But I always wonder about that. If people could see me the way I see myself—if they could live in my memories—would anyone, anyone, love me?
When you acknowledge that there is nothing repulsive or unforgivable or shameful about yourself, it becomes easier to be that authentic person and feel like you're living a less performed life.
There are always answers. We just have to be smart enough.
Reading a good book helps us to feel un-alone.
She had the kind of fingers you want to interlace with your own.
I love being in cities with lots of other people, because I'm reminded that there are billions of people like me, and we are each stuck inside of our minds, feverishly trying to crawl out to make connections with other people.
You matter as much as the things that matter to you do.
The book was turned to the page with Anne Frank's name, but what got me about it was the fact that right beneath her name there were four Aron Franks. FOUR. Four Aron Franks without museums, without historical markers, without anyone to mourn them. I silently resolved to remember and pray for the four Aron Franks as long as I was around.
Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease.
The urge to make art or contemplate philosophy does not go away when you are sick. Those urges just become transfigured by illness.
I always had this idea that you should never give up a happy middle in the hopes of a happy ending, because there is no such thing as a happy ending. Do you know what I mean? There is so much to lose.
Writing is something you do alone. It's a profession for introverts who wanna tell you a story but don't wanna make eye contact while telling it
I hate the idea that, when it comes to books and learning, hard is often seen as the opposite of fun. It's strange to me that we should be so quick to give up on a book or a math problem when we are so willing to grapple, for centuries if necessary, with a single level of Angry Birds.
Have you really read all those books in your room?” Alaska laughing- “Oh God no. I’ve maybe read a third of ‘em. But I’m going to read them all. I call it my Life’s Library. Every summer since I was little, I’ve gone to garage sales and bought all the books that looked interesting. So I always have something to read.
He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.
The vast majority of us imagine ourselves as like literature people or math people. But the truth is that the massive processor known as the human brain is neither a literature organ or a math organ. It is both and more.
I believe in that line from An Imperial Affliction. 'The risen sun too bright in her losing eyes.' That's God, I think, the rising sun, and the light is too bright and her eyes are losing but they aren't lost.
She had this dark cancer water dripping out of her chest. Eyes closed. Intubated. But her hand was still her hand, still warm and the nails painted this almost black dark blue and I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she would never know that I was going, too. But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar.
But a lot of times, people die how they live. And so last words tell me a lot about who people were, and why they became the sort of people biographies get written about.
Everybody should have true love, and it should last at least as long as your life does.
The thing about chameleoning your way through life is that it gets to where nothing is real.
One of the others shouted a translation: "The beautiful couple is beautiful.
The amazing thing is that we're right to hold onto hope. The world may be broken but hope is not crazy.
I don't think pandemics make us afraid of death, I think they make us afraid of oblivion. They force us to grapple with the futility of effort. Also they make us barf which isn't fun either... Wash your hands, cover your coughs, and find a way to hold in balance the futility of effort with the necessity to struggle.
We think that we are invincible because we are.
You can't dingleberry that! That's a flagrant misuse of the dingleberry!
By saying you don’t care if the world falls apart, in some small way you’re saying you want it to stay together, on your own terms.
I'm not saying it was your fault. I'm saying it wasn't nice.
People always get used to beauty though.
Nothing is as boring as other people's dreams.
I thought being an adult meant knowing what you believe, but that has not been my experience.
The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, there was no longer anyone to remember with.
I always had this secret suspicion that I was special.
The part I enjoy most is not the doing, but the noticing.
The preciousness of the moment, which should make it easier to talk, makes it harder.
Do the thing you're good at. Not many people are lucky enough to be so good at something.
No reason to be angry. Anger just distracts from the all-encompassing sadness.
Need is never a good basis for any relationship.
Love is tied to truth.
Memories fall apart too.
It seems to me that all the things we keep in sealed boxes are both alive and dead until we open the box, that the unobserved is both there and not.
I’ll give you my strength if I can have your remission.
Most loves don't last. But some do.
When you leave a place, it's best to leave.
My regret was immediate and permanent and useless.
That tastes like hope feels.
― John Green Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
